If you've watched the Indie Game: The Movie documentary, you will have seen just some of the challenges of game development. Game development is mentally, physically, and emotionally taxing. Especially considering people invest financially and emotionally into their projects. They sacrifice hours of family time, or any spare time at all to develop their game. Some have no job and run off savings, or in the case of some, live off their parents' or spouse's income.

The stress of development too is very difficult. For the most part, the workload that around 200 people do is put on the shoulders of one or two people. So you have to consider that not only are you programming a game, but you are creating all the images, sound effects, and music. That's a lot of work! There have also been many times when developing a game, you get so intensely into it that nothing else matters. Then you get a game killing bug. Then there's the stress of the interruption, and the stress of finding the error, which can take many many hours to locate.

Now let's talk about the difficulty of learning a new programming language.

Some languages are a little less complex than others, but for the most part, learning a new language is exactly that. You are learning a new language. Did you ever take a secondary language in school? I took French and Spanish and I picked up Spanish much faster than I did French. Why? Some languages are easier than others. It still takes a lot of time and effort to study.

How long, and how much did you study your language courses? The same amount of effort is required for learning a coding language. It's tough work. Who has the time either? Courses can be costly too, costing around $10,000 per course, and tutorials are helpful but not always easy to follow as most of them assume you know the program and language. If something goes wrong, you are kind of out of luck because there's no explanation. Sure you can search forums and post comments, but who's to say you'll get a response?

What the heck does that mean?! Ah, syntax and semantic errors. Now this is where this book comes in handy...